The American writer Richard Powers, National Book Award winner, Pulitzer Prize finalist and recipient of the MacArthur Genius Fellowship, is a specialist in juxtaposition — in bridging ideas traditionally separated by academic discipline and connecting stories across space and time. If his new novel, Orfeo, has little to offer in the way of pleasure or interest, then it is not because the ideas and stories fail to connect but because the connections are obvious.

Powers’ hero, Peter Els, is an avant-garde composer whose attempts to find — or possibly hide — musical forms in bacterial plasmids are mistaken for an act of bioterrorism. But despite the novel’s persistent air of epiphany and the wealth of effortful wordplay nudging us to accept the eerie overlaps (“spectral harmonies and harmonic spectroscopy”), it will come as news to virtually no one that musicology has things in common with the natural sciences — and not just because Powers’ most rigorous novel, The Gold Bug Variations, told us that more than 20 years ago.

Underwhelming as an essay, slow-footed as a thriller, Orfeo is more ineffective still as a portrait of an age and a nation. Peter was spared Vietnam — Cold War America valued musical prowess — and benefited unexpectedly from the Waco massacre, though it would be a stretch to say that the historical backdrop has been seamlessly integrated. “HPSCHD runs for almost five hours... Two months later, men walk on the moon.” “While he trained students how to hear seventh chords in the third inversion, the globe went over the financial brink.” Even in old age, Peter trains his sight on the passing scene, providing a vehicle for some fairly sweaty hand-wringing, as when we encounter 21st-century young-people, “each with a private clamshell, checking on the ten million Facebook frenemies they will meet in heaven”.

A detour to London, though it provides relief from Peter’s endless zipping around the US, also serves to emphasise what the novel lacks in terms of magic and mystery and strangeness. It is offered as a tribute to another English interlude, the passage from Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow in which a young couple pay a visit to a church in Kent at the end of 1944. But where Pynchon’s portrait of an icy, comfortless evensong, with its central 2,100-word paragraph, reflects powerfully on the sense of collective purpose shattered by the Second World War, the equivalent here, in which Peter attends a concert at St Martin-in-the-Fields, provides yet more unwanted back-story.

Powers has said that the Pynchon scene, which he re-reads every year, reminds him that the “real medium of exchange” is not information, as modern society and one of Pynchon’s characters suggest, but literary language. It is odd, then, that while Orfeo takes the potential of language very seriously, its basic units of exchange, the commodities it trades in, are not elusive and complex human emotions, say, but familiar and banal: heavy-handed plot-points, technical data, scientific facts.